
The Cleek family lives in a middle-class country area; under the father there's mother Belle (Angela Bettis), quasi-goth loner high-school daughter Peggy (Lauren Ashley Carter), young teenage son Brian (Zach Rand), and post-toddler Darlin' (Shyla Molhusen). The facade of their normalcy is revealed through Chris's depravity; finding a mysterious, "uncivilized" woman (Pollyanna McIntosh) in the woods while hunting, he bags her, clears some space in the cellar, and chains her up. She's ferocious; a mesmerizing opening sequence suggests she's been raised by wolves, but that's the extent of her background. Quite like Terrence Stamp's unnamed visitor in Pasolini's Teorema, her presence bubbles tensions lying just beneath the surface, eventually bringing them, by turns both hilarious and horrifying, to an irretractable boiling point. Much like last year's Dogtooth (the first masterpiece of the new decade), The Woman is not so much parodic as embittered by its almost ineffable anger directed towards hegemonic cultural codes. However, by turning hostility into humor and irreverence, both filmmakers imbue a degree of sincerity, which makes their blood-soaked codas equal parts indeterminate and cathartic, but not illusory - the problem still lingers.
Most interesting about The Woman is the "battle-of-the-sexes" showdown that materializes throughout; suggesting "boys will be boys" rhetoric as the ignition of sexist subterfuge and nationalistic pride (an irrational belief of self-righteousness), McKee goes to dark (but necessary) places in fulfilling the totality of his satirical grasp, keying in on (as few filmmakers have been able to) a distinctly American focus on materiality and capital. When Brian sneaks into the cellar to torture and rape the eponymous Woman, the father's ultimate assessment is: "Well, if no one was harmed, then everything's fine." In concentrating on tangible results (visible evidence of bodily damage), McKee implicitly critiques capitalistic drives, the belief in "no harm, no foul" if the damage cannot be evidenced in empirical ways. Ignoring shame, pride, honor, dignity (emotion, essentially), morals and ethics are irrevocably cast-aside, enabling a rationalization of depravity. While one of the sole references to religion is a bit egregious (Chris cartoonishly claims he "still wants to get to heaven" after committing rape), it nevertheless problematizes a reductive reading or take, since McKee is not pinpointing a specific genesis for this sort of chauvinist, "mightier-than-thou" behavior. There's a persistent ambivalence concurrent throughout, and right when The Woman feels like it's about to go off-the-rails, McKee tightens the screws, ups the ante, and dares you, to use a crude (but appropriate) colloquialism, to "pull-out." When McKee's at his sharpest, there are no easy answers.
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